Vacation Week: NYC

February 28, 2011

I’m back in Boston, staring at the rain and clutching a box of tissues. Not a pretty picture. Unfortunately I got sick halfway through my week of vacation relaxation, but luckily it was a week of fun and sun, not of work and rain! Because of being sick I didn’t get to do as much as I had wanted, but I’ll share some of the food related things I was able to do before falling under the weather!

NYC, a magical place where I can’t get enough food. The options and amazingness are totally overwhelming, so much so that if my friend and I don’t plan ahead, we end up going to the same places. Talk about a bubble… but I figure if that bubble involves Momofuku Milk Bar (East Village) in any capacity, I’m the happiest of campers.

One of the things I love most about the Milk Bar is the addition of new flavors and new treats; I don’t get down to NYC as often as I used to which means that every time I go to the Milk Bar there are new soft serve flavors, new cake truffles, and sometimes new cakes. The pretzel cake truffles were new, and I physically/emotionally cannot say “no” to cake truffles.

Apple Pie Cake Truffle. Does anyone else think it’s funny when it seems like there are too many nouns in a name? On a more relevant note, I’m enamored with (enamored of?) the cake crumbs that their pastry chef created, especially when they shine in the blueberries and cream cookie.

We did make it to a new place: Sugar Sweet Sunshine bakery. I heartily enjoyed the cupcakes and flavors. The cupcakes pictured above are Strawberry Peanut Butter and Pistachio. If there is pistachio anything on a bakery menu, I’m a goner. I loved how the cake was ever so slightly salty. The strawberry peanut butter was fantastic! It had creamy peanut butter frosting, which tasted like spreadable peanut butter egg filling, and strawberries baked throughout the cake. I think the cake was supposed to be peanut butter, but it must have taken a back seat to the strawberries and peanut butter frosting. My friend got the chocolate-chocolate cupcake, and the icing was chocolate almond. I love, LOVE the chocolate almond pairing, and feel like I don’t see it enough outside of chocolate almond candy.

Another cool thing about Sugar Sweet Sunshine? They do pudding flights one night a week, where you get a pudding sampler containing all four of their flavors. Now that I’m thinking about it, one of the new ways of eating at the Milk Bar was to order a soft serve sampler, which came with a little of all their soft serve flavors. Dessert flights might just be the best idea… EVER! Perhaps a little gluttonous, but it helps those of us who can’t make decisions because they want everything me.